Monthly Archives: December 2009

There’ll be nowhere to run from the new world government‘Global’ thinking won’t necessarily solve the world’s problems, says Janet Daley

By Janet DaleyPublished: 7:24PM GMT19 Dec 2009

There is scope for debate – and innumerable newspaper quizzes – about who was the most influential public figure of the year, or which the most significant event. But there can be little doubt which word won the prize for most important adjective. 2009was the year in which “global” swept the rest of the political lexicon into obscurity. There were “global crises” and “global challenges”, the only possible resolution to which lay in “global solutions” necessitating “global agreements”. Gordon Brown actually suggested something called a “global alliance” in response to climate change. (Would this be an alliance against the Axis of Extra-Terrestrials?)

Some of this was sheer hokum: when uttered by Gordon Brown, the word “global”, as in “global economic crisis”, meant: “It’s not my fault”. To the extent that the word had intelligible meaning, it also had political ramifications that were scarcely examined by those who bandied it about with such ponderous self-importance. The mere utterance of it was assumed to sweep away any consideration of what was once assumed to be the most basic principle of modern democracy: that elected national governments are responsible to their own people – that the right to govern derives from the consent of the electorate.

The dangerous idea that the democratic accountability of national governments should simply be dispensed with in favour of “global agreements” reached after closed negotiations between world leaders never, so far as I recall, entered into the arena of public discussion. Except in the United States, where it became a very contentious talking point, the US still holding firmly to the 18th-century idea that power should lie with the will of the people.

Nor was much consideration given to the logical conclusion of all this grandiose talk of global consensus as unquestionably desirable: if there was no popular choice about approving supranational “legally binding agreements”, what would happen to dissenters who did not accept their premises (on climate change, for example) when there was no possibility of fleeing to another country in protest? Was this to be regarded as the emergence of world government? And would it have powers of policing and enforcement that would supersede the authority of elected national governments? In effect, this was the infamous “democratic deficit” of the European Union elevated on to a planetary scale. And if the EU model is anything to go by, then the agencies of global authority will involve vast tracts of power being handed to unelected officials. Forget the relatively petty irritations of Euro‑bureaucracy: welcome to the era of Earth-bureaucracy, when there will be literally nowhere to run.

But, you may say, however dire the political consequences, surely there is something in this obsession with global dilemmas. Economics is now based on a world market, and if the planet really is facing some sort of man-made climate crisis, then that too is a problem that transcends national boundaries. Surely, if our problems are universal the solutions must be as well.

Well, yes and no. Calling a problem “global” is meant to imply three different things: that it is the result of the actions of people in different countries; that those actions have impacted on the lives of everyone in the world; and that the remedy must involve pretty much identical responses or correctives to those actions. These are separate premises, any of which might be true without the rest of them necessarily being so. The banking crisis certainly had its roots in the international nature of finance, but the way it affected countries and peoples varied considerably according to the differences in their internal arrangements. Britain suffered particularly badly because of its addiction to public and private debt, whereas Australia escaped relatively unscathed.

That a problem is international in its roots does not necessarily imply that the solution must involve the hammering out of a uniform global prescription: in fact, given the differences in effects and consequences for individual countries, the attempt to do such hammering might be a huge waste of time and resources that could be put to better use devising national remedies. France and Germany seem to have pulled themselves out of recession over the past year (and the US may be about to do so) while Britain has not. These variations owe almost nothing to the pompous, overblown attempts to find global solutions: they are largely to do with individual countries, under the pressure of democratic accountability, doing what they decide is best for their own people.

This is not what Mr Brown calls “narrow self-interest”, or “beggar my neighbour” ruthlessness. It is the proper business of elected national leaders to make judgments that are appropriate for the conditions of their own populations. It is also right that heads of nations refuse to sign up to “legally binding” global agreements which would disadvantage their own people. The resistance of the developing nations to a climate change pact that would deny them the kind of economic growth and mass prosperity to which advanced countries have become accustomed is not mindless selfishness: it is proper regard for the welfare of their own citizens.

The word “global” has taken on sacred connotations. Any action taken in its name must be inherently virtuous, whereas the decisions of individual countries are necessarily “narrow” and self-serving. (Never mind that a “global agreement” will almost certainly be disproportionately influenced by the most powerful nations.) Nor is our era so utterly unlike previous ones, for all its technological sophistication. We have always needed multilateral agreements, whether about trade, organised crime, border controls, or mutual defence.

If the impact of our behaviour on humanity at large is much greater or more rapid than ever before then we shall have to find ways of dealing with that which do not involve sacrificing the most enlightened form of government ever devised. There is a whiff of totalitarianism about this new theology, in which the risks are described in such cosmic terms that everything else must give way. “Globalism” is another form of the internationalism that has been a core belief of the Left: a commitment to class rather than country seemed an admirable antidote to the “blood and soil” nationalism that gave rise to fascism.

The nation-state has never quite recovered from the bad name it acquired in the last century as the progenitor of world war. But if it is to be relegated to the dustbin of history then we had better come up with new mechanisms for allowing people to have a say in how they are governed.

***…Right now, if you listen to what President Obama is likely to do, you know that the government prop for the economy is going to be taken away. Get ready because the second dip will occur. It will be nasty: unemployment will be higher and stocks will go lower than in 2009. I The question now is one of timing: when will the government stop propping up the economy? The more robust the [short-term, government-spending-based] recovery, the quicker the prop ends and the sooner we get a second leg down…***

And to “fix things”, bet on the Feds/states/locals/ looking to confiscate by taxation anything of your property that they possibly can.

Are you going to let them do so?

Comments Off on >The Recession Is Over — But The Depression Has Just Begun

Denninger explains why the piper must be paid soon, how much, and what will happen if Congress and the President keep making things worse:***…… that does not involve serious pain.

Go ahead folks – tell me how we can simply ignore this [graph above].

How we can pretend that the outstanding debt does not have to come back down to reasonable levels?

That these levels are “reasonable” – and that these rates of growth are “reasonable.”

This is the “magic of compounding” writ large – and in a fashion that is going to inflict severe pain on our population – and the longer we wait to deal with it, the worse it will be.

Bernanke, who was at The Fed during Greenspan’s time there, should have used his “education” – his claimed knowledge of economics – to make a lot of noise about this and demand that interest rates NOT be lowered to further encourage more debt-based consumption.

He did exactly the opposite.

As this decade wore on he should have sounded the alarm on our debt binge in all sectors, especially in the financial and consumer sectors where the growth in indebtedness has been the highest.

He did exactly the opposite.

Since this crisis began, in fact, every single government official who has spoken on the matter has emphasized even more lending, that is, cranking the amount of debt outstanding even higher, and The Federal Government has made good on their intent by, in the last year, spending more than $1.7 trillion dollars they did not have – that is, they borrowed even more.

That “pumping” of credit is why the stock market has “recovered.”

BUT IT CANNOT AND WILL NOT STAY “recovered”, because the debt that is outstanding is unsustainable – interest costs are crushing innovation and we are now absolutely reliant on near-zero interest rates lest everything collapse.

When a person’s actions are restricted to what can be defined as self-defense, the assailant controls many of the variables they face. Time; place; daylight; dark; cold or hot are many of the variables one must consider. Therefore, the variables that we can control must be mastered if we are to have a chance for survival if ever faced with a do-or-die situation.

Those who own firearms and practice with them enough to be considered proficient in their use, most likely choose good weather in which to practice; light conditions are optimal and a good comfort level is maintained. Sure, you can hit that silhouette at 25 ft with both hands the majority of the time with optimal conditions with your favorite handgun. You can also hit that target at 300 yards with your battle rifle, sometimes putting all your shots in a small group when conditions are great; fine indeed if your attack occurs only during the daylight with no wind and the temperature hovering around 72. How many know how they will perform these tasks when faced with darkness, heavy wind, freezing temperatures or blowing snow? Better yet, how many know how their equipment will perform in less than ideal conditions?

If you can be 100% certain you will only be faced with a life-or-death self-defense situation when conditions are ideal, stop reading now; the following will be of no interest to you.

Monday and Tuesday here in the Rockies witnessed blizzard conditions with 1–2 feet of snow, blowing winds sometimes reaching 50 mph and temperatures near zero. While most folks thought this the best time to hunker down with a good book or movie, I got together all of the firearms, ammo and equipment that I might have to use to defend my life and/or the life of my family and headed for the range. I’m sure any who witnessed me entering the range that day were comforted in the thought that I was totally insane. When the 5-hour session was over, I was very cold and miserable, but I knew how both my equipment and I would function in that environment. I viewed the experience as a variable somewhat mastered.

The things that can be learned about ones firearms and equipment in terrible conditions could be the edge one needs to stay alive at some point in time and most useful when it becomes necessary to provide food for the table. Calculating for point of impact with projectiles down range in a 50 mph wind with numb fingers and blinding snow presented a real challenge. Then, to try all of the tactical sights on targets at less than 100 yards was quite an experience. Which ones work and which ones do not was a question that was answered for me along with what reticle performs best in blizzard conditions. Which action on what rifle actually froze up and would not function at all? What firearms lubricants held up in those conditions? What trigger guards were of adequate size to handle a gloved finger? All questions I had answered for me that would not have occurred had I not taken the time to train in those conditions.

Some time back I spent equal time in training in the desert around Tucson Arizona in the month of June. Again, not everything performs as advertised in a 100-degree plus environment, most of all the owner of the equipment. Taking the necessary time to train in all environs in which one could possibly find themselves is vital. Equipment, physics, physiology and how they relate to your ability to function in a stressful situation are invaluable pieces of knowledge. Once you possess this knowledge, you increase your confidence to deal with any situation ten fold. Confidence and mental preparation will see one through many situations where the ignorant will fail to survive.

Training with your chosen equipment in optimal conditions is fine and should be done on a regular basis to become as proficient as possible and to understand exactly how your equipment functions. This should include being able to make adjustments and repairs as might be required and assembly and disassembly of your chosen firearm. Having necessary spare parts is also a must. Say you have a bent charging handle on your AR platform; do you know how to replace it? What about replacing a broken firing pin?

Equally important is knowing and understanding how you and your equipment function in extreme environments. Once you understand how everything works, take it all out during extreme cold and heat; try them in a pouring rain and windy conditions; disassemble and assemble in low-light situations without giving away your position.

All of the above could be the determining factors in whether you and your family are able to survive an attack or able are to provide food for survival if/when the situation demands.

Here are a few key trends which will gather momentum in 2010–trends drawn from the Survival+ analysis.

My purpose in writing Survival+ was to provide a coherent account (i.e. an integrated understanding) of the powerful trends which are working beneath the superficial surface of our economy and culture.

Survival+ explains why the status quo is doomed, and illuminates the mechanisms which doom it. It also describes “the way out”–we must each put our energy into constructing a parallel, transparent, self-organized, re-localized system which is entirely legal and entirely independent of the failing, doomed status quo which is stripmining the productive to enrich the public and private Elites (file under “Fall of the Empire, Roman and other”).

Here are a few of the trends described in Survival+ which I anticipate will be gathering momentum in 2010.1. Millions of productive citizens will opt out, voluntarily or involuntarily. Millions of small business owners will get tired of paying taxes so thousands of Federal bureaucrats can “earn” $170,000 a year (and pile up benefits the private sector can only dream about) and make sure Goldman Sachs employees (the “doing God’s work” CEO is only worth $250 million, poor guy) can divvy up $16 billion in ill-gotten gains.

While they aren’t wealthy, many small business owners are comfortable because they scrimped and saved and sacrificed. So when they close their business because it’s no longer worth the hassle, the guff, the taxes, the bureaucratic fees and paperwork, then they will survive. The closure of the business will deprive their employees of jobs and the local stripmining machinery (local government) of tax revenues–revenues which cannot be replaced.

Given the dominance of the financial sector, agribusiness, pharmaceuticals and a hundred other concentrations of capital and political power (cartels), then the individual citizen has literally no choice but to opt out.

Those who have worked like crazy to net $170,000 will no longer be willing to work that hard so they can pay absurdly high tax rates to support bureaucrats raking in $170,000 a year for going to pre-meetings (or whatever) and public-employee retirees double-dipping (drawing $100K+ pensions and bennies and getting rehired immediately on contract to do the same job they just left.)

No, thank you, we really don’t need to work this hard to support you. We are tired of being serfs. The more you try to tax “the rich,” the more “rich” people will opt out.

Many will be opted out involuntarily. Those who believed the fantasy that sacrificing their lives to make partner or get that corner office will suffer great disillusionment when they are axed without a qualm. They “won’t be fooled again.” Take your 60-hour a week career, Corporate America, and shove it where the sun doesn’t shine.

Others will be opted out by the structural implosion of the industries they worked in for decades. Just today I saw a man about my age (mid-50s) gathering recycling on our street. I’d seen him sorting through the bins before, so I asked him if he was collecting glass or plastic. Since he was not using a cart, he said, “no glass, just plastic” so I went to get our neighbors’ bins of recycling for him.

Whenever I see a guy or gal collecting recyclables, I think how little separates us.

In chatting with the gent, I learned that he’d been a carpenter for 25 years, never without work until last year. He was expecting an extension on his unemployment shortly which would enable him to move out of the homeless shelter. He still had his work truck, stored at a friend’s house.

I don’t know if construction will ever come back to the point that all the hundreds of thousands of people who made a living in the industry will be employed again. I think not; bubbles don’t reinflate.

The same can be said of millions of people laid off from retail and a hundred other industries. The jobs aren’t coming back, regardless of what propaganda is issued by Washington. (Note to Obama White House: start issuing indictments, not more worthless propaganda.)

2. Millions of households will get by on one salary where they once had two. As the status quo devolves, jobs are starting to disappear even from the so-called “invulnerable” industries like government and healthcare.

3. Internecine Conflict Between Protected Fiefdoms will intensify. As Federal and local government tax revenues continue plummeting, “tax the rich” schemes will proliferate and promptly backfire. The truly wealthy–the 1/10 of 1% who own some 2/3 of the productive assets of the nation–will buy exemptions or loopholes from their corrupt and venal Congressperson for a mere $100,000 or so. (Even a million is cheap when you’re saving $100 million.)

That leaves the working “rich,” those professionals and business owners who have a choice. They can always opt out and just shut down, move to another state or country or cut their business or hours down to subsistence level.The more “raise taxes” schemes which are passed into law, the faster tax revenues will drop. Most lower income households pay no tax at all except the 7% FICA/Social Security tax. The “rich” pay almost all the income taxes, and as they opt out tax revenues have nowhere to go but down.

Stunned that their revenue-enhancement plans have backfired, the various protected fiefdoms (fire departments, cop shops, city hall, school districts, transit districts, universities, “Defense” a.k.a. Global Empire, brought to you by Military-Industrial Complex, Inc., with special guest, Blackwater Associates, Sickcare/Medicare/Medicaid, and so on) will start jockeying to be first in line for the dwindling tax swag.

Fire departments will start mailing out flyers pleading for extra property taxes lest they have to close a station or three (anything other than take a pay cut or slash their lavish pension/medical bennies) and Police chiefs will exit their chauffeured vehicles a block from the “town meeting” (so they can appear to walk in with appropriate humility) where they will plead for “more cops on the street.” (Never mind the PD retirees drawing $100K per year in cash and bennies.)

The revolving door between “Defense” corporations and the Pentagon will spin even faster as lobbyists sprout like evil weeds, hawking new costly ways to “fight” GWOT (global war on terrorism). “Either pay us now or the nation will be at risk.” Yeah, right. Like a $300 million fighter jet has anything to do with GWOT, or “Homeland Security” has anything to do with, well, homeland security.Go ahead and nail another “terrorist leader” in the Yemeni wastelands with a high-tech drone missile; did anyone look at the demographics of the region, which is exploding with literally millions of young men devoid of goals and gainful employment? Are high-tech weaponry toys anything other than profit machines for Protected Fiefdoms? Go ask the captains and commanders on the ground before you answer; don’t take the word of some overpaid pundit/PR hack/government factotum.

Sadly for the Protected Fiefdoms, there simply won’t be enough money to fund all their fat jobs, fat pensions, fat benefits, fat expense accounts, fat contracts, etc. (The Chinese have simply stopped buying more U.S. Treasuries, by the way; the “pusher” is getting tired of providing endless credit to the junkie, who will soon be experiencing the dread tremors of agonizing withdrawal from credit dependency.)

That’s when the Internecine Conflict begins in earnest. Dark mutterings will turn into angry rants; everything is sacrosanct and must be funded “at all costs”: subway and bus service, education, cops, fire department, carbon credits (more on that new Wall Street scam next week), and of course, sickcare–and above it all, the high keening whine that “we were promised this forever and ever,” “it’s in the contract.”

Check the streetwise reply: “You can’t get blood from a turnip.”

The snake can eat its tail for awhile, but at some point the transit agency will rebel at the cost of sickcare “insurance,” and so on; each Protected Fiefdom will be sharpening their knives for other Protected Fiefdoms. Politicos, bought and paid for many times over, will find it impossible to reconcile all the demands placed on the fast-dwindling tax swag under their control. Like tribes unused to cooperation, no fiefdom will consider negotiating a 25% cut in pay, benefits and pensions for all the fiefdoms; each will seek to eviscerate the budgets of other fiefdoms to protect their own share of the swag. All will fail and the entire government will slip into insolvency. Greed, avarice and blindess have consequences…

(CNSNews.com) – Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) told CNSNews.com that Congress has the authority to force individual Americans to buy health insurance because the U.S. Constitution “charges Congress with the health and well-being of the people.”

The words “health” and “well-being” do not appear anywhere in the Constitution.

The Congressional Budget Office has determined that in the entire history of the United States the federal government has never mandated that Americans buy any good or service. Both the House and Senate health care bills, however, include provisions that require all legal residents of the U.S. to purchase health insurance, a provision whose constitutionality has been qiuestioned by, among others, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R.-Utah), the former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

At a press conference on Capitol Hill, CNSNews.com asked Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and Blanche Lincoln the following question: “What part of the Constitution do you think gives Congress the authority to mandate that individuals have to purchase health insurance?”

Lincoln did not answer the question during the press conference but spoke to CNSNews.com in the Dirksen Senate Office Building immediately afterward. CNSNews.com asked her there: ‘You didn’t respond to my constitutionality question during the press conference, and what was your reaction to, your answer to the question?”

“Well, I just think the Constitution charges Congress with the health and well-being of the people,” Lincoln said.

CNSNews.com then asked the Senator: “So, what area though? You’re saying the health and well-being. What area, though, does that fall under?”

“The health and well-being of the people of the country,” she replied…***

***I’ve just been watching this video [above] of Lord Monckton laying into the Climategate gang. What makes it so potent is that he is quite bluntly calling them crooks, and calling anyone who still follows their fraudulent prophecies dupes and fools. He names names, and crimes. Yes, crimes. And yes, criminals. Criminals with names. Monckton does all this in his posh British public school voice. Nevertheless, you can almost see him doing that thing that fist fighters do, but with their beckoning hands rather than with their mouths, and pointing at their own chins. Come and get me! Give me your best shot! I say you are a pack of scoundrels. Prove me wrong! I say that the logical thing to do about “climate change” is: nothing. Nothing. Why on earth do you still have the damned nerve to think anything else?

Such pugilistic vulgarities are not to be found in the text of the talk. Monckton is too canny, too cool, to get that excited.

But that is the subtext.

Here is some other evidence that those with the job of chasing crooks are now getting interested in this.

I agree with Johnathan Pearce in the previous posting that the old-school media are definitely, albeit belatedly and with much embarrassment and confusion, starting to notice all this. You can feel that most crucial of propaganda processes happening with Climategate: the reversing of the burden of proof. Unfair to all the fraud detectives (Watts, McIntyre, and the rest of them, including Monckton himself) though it undoubtedly was, those noble toilers, until the Climategate revelations erupted, had to prove everything, in defiance of the default position. Their every tiny blemish was jumped upon. Their major claims were ignored. Now the default position is slowly mutating into: It’s all made-up nonsense. And the burden of proof is shifting onto the shoulders of all those who want to go on believing in such ever more discredited alarmism. In short, our side is winning this argument, big time…***

DON VANDERGRIFF: On Adaptive Leadership

Obviously, warfare and conflict in the 21st Century present new challenges. It’s not only hideously complex, mercurial, and lightning fast — it’s an environment where missteps or brain dead actions of an individual or small group can unwind the work of an entire Army within hours.

The solution to these challenges isn’t achieved by:

automating new layers of oversight/controls on individual behavior or

hermetically sealing off the organization’s members from the outside world or

developing ever more complex doctrines that appear to solve every contingency.

Instead, the answer is to train leaders to think adaptively.* So, how do you accomplish this? How do you train leaders to think adaptively?** The best answer I have found so far is found in the work of Don Vandergriff. He’s done more deep thinking and generated more experience actually training adaptive leaders than anybody else. Here’s some links to his work on the topic:

* I could go into a long explanation for why this is so, but frankly Don does a better job than I would.

** I consider adaptive thinking is a requirement for all 21st Century organizations — corporate, military, agency, NGO, or insurgent. Even further: the best organizations make adaptive thinking a requirement for ALL of its members.

Do you know where your carry pistol and ammunition impact on a IDPA target at 50 yards?

What about 100 yards?

Have you tried to find out?

Suggestion:

– From a prone or other stable position, fire five rounds, slow fire, at an IDPA target at 50 yards, using a high center-mass hold.

– After checking your target, adjust your point of aim and fire five more slow-fire rounds.

– Check your target again and repeat, changing your point of aim as necessary, until your rounds are all impacting the target in the high center-mass area. Do NOT adjust your sights, as the purpose of this drill is to determine where your sidearm and carry ammunition shoot at non-sidearm distances.

– Once you can keep all five rounds in the high center-mass area, repeat this exercise with your target located at 100 yards.

Memorize your aiming points derived by these drills, and practice at least quarterly.

Warning: This book is NOT the typical heavily-digested cartoon-book political pundit pap.

Nor is it a scholarly work intended to talk down to you from an ivory tower as you swim around in the moat in a world that doesn’t seem to make sense anymore, and gets worse each day.

In fact, books like both of those I describe above are part of the problem. They whip people up into a frenzy, or bore them to tears, but don’t offer any practical advice other than to tell you to try to teach someone else.

And yet, the problems seem to grow worse the more we try to teach. And now our problems are no longer simple-issue problems.

Environmentalism, which used to seem almost harmless, now threatens to box in our quality of life in ways we never intended. Left unchecked, this particular bit of insanity threatens to starve billions of people. And some of those billions will be right here among us.

Investing and saving no longer makes sense. Real estate, stable industries, essential commodities, all of these traditionally sound places to put your money just flop around and seem to only exist to extract your savings. And now hyperinflation will strip away almost everything you earned, particularly if you listen to the advice of pundits that demand that you pay down credit and save every penny. Why, so that hyperinflation can just chew your nest egg down to nothing?

You are told at every turn to care about the children, yet no one seems to care about yours. Why won’t they get off of your back and just let you raise your own kids? Public schools are turning into indoctrination camps, while homeschoolers are demonized more each day.

Higher education is turning more hollow each year. Tuitions skyrocket while the quality of education plummets. And now advocates such as Ron Paul are warning that these institutions, too, will turn from mere indoctrination camps into soft-core labor camps.

Yet our system is supposed to protect you from stupidity like this. You elect people to represent you, but when they get to Washington they lose their minds and start acting just like the last guy. It seems as if your vote doesn’t count anymore.

It seems this way because your vote doesn’t count anymore. And there is a simple reason why.

Because YOU don’t count anymore. At least not to the people who make the decisions that affect every aspect of your life.

And they are not who you think they are. There are no conspiracies, and no smoke-filled rooms where fat-cats pull the strings.

Nope.

The reality is FAR worse than that. Because if there was a mysterious “they” out there getting together in little cabals, we could do something about that.

But while we spend our time and our energy throwing tea-parties and thinking that all we have to do is to simply get the message out loudly enough, we are missing the essential nugget.

A nugget that no pundit is willing to address.

And that nugget is that the non-productive electorate now outnumbers us, the productive minority of the nation. We have passed the tipping point where voting and protesting and educating no longer helps us any more, because the oppressive majority knows exactly what they are doing to us, and laughs at our efforts to free ourselves with posterboard. [emphasis added — WRSA editor]

This book would never pass the filtering process that exists at a normal publisher. Why?

Because it is too realistic. Because it shows exactly where the problems in our modern world lie. And what to do about it.

And no, those solutions don’t involve violence, or “grab your gun”, or any other kind of “let’s go git ’em, boys!” kind of foolishness.

Doing that would only get you killed. And the responsible parties would rejoice at your sacrifice. Because that is exactly what they want you to do. Get killed, so that you, and your ideas, are out of the way.

Don’t give them the satisfaction. Besides, your brothers are going to need you later.

I am about 40% through this book, and am confident enough to recommend it to all of you as food for thought and recalculation — as well as one of the best descriptions of maneuver warfare concepts I have ever read.

In the context of this book, a monkey is defined as a person that chooses to collectively seize, by unearned means, the property, material or intellectual, temporal or spiritual, of its rightful owner. The means employed may be fiat, guilt, force, theft, fraud, subterfuge, or anything other than a willing and negotiated exchange of value.

In our modern world, each person is given the opportunity to make a conscious choice whether to be monkeys or men.

Conspicuously absent from this definition is race, birth, gender, heritage, cultural influences, or any factor other than that singular deliberate decision.

But men choose to live their lives upon their own merit. It is this very spirit of independence of thought and action that makes men the prey of the monkey collective.

As such, monkeys abandon their claim to the rights of men.

But monkeys could just as easily choose not to, and become men themselves.

Consider the number of moochers and looters that surround each of us.

If you can’t outthink ’em, do you really believe that you and yours can hold them off your property, family, and life?

***WASHINGTON— The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) ended fiscal year 2009 with an overall deficit of $22 billion, according to the agency’s Annual Management Report submitted to Congress today. The result compares with the $11.2 billion deficit recorded at the previous fiscal year-end on September 30, 2008.

The deficit in the PBGC’s insurance program for single-employer pension plans widened to $21.1 billion for the year, $10.4 billion more than the prior-year’s $10.7 billion shortfall. The separate insurance program for multiemployer pension plans posted a deficit of $869 million, exceeding last year’s $473 million shortfall by $396 million.

In an interim report to Congress in May, the agency showed a record deficit of $33.5 billion, based on unaudited numbers at the fiscal year mid-point on March 31.

The Annual Management Report classified 27 large pension plans with total underfunding of $1.64 billion as probable losses on the PBGC balance sheet. The report also shows that the agency’s potential exposure to future pension losses from financially weak companies increased to about $168 billion from the $47 billion booked in fiscal year 2008.

“Exposure to possible future terminations means that we could face much higher deficits in the future,” said Acting Director Vincent K. Snowbarger. “We won’t fail to meet our obligations to retirees, but ultimately we will need a long-term solution to stabilize the pension insurance program…”

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) protects the retirement incomes of more than 44 million American workers in more than 29,000 private-sector defined benefit pension plans. A defined benefit plan provides a specified monthly benefit at retirement, often based on a combination of salary and years of service. PBGC was created by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 to encourage the continuation and maintenance of private-sector defined benefit pension plans, provide timely and uninterrupted payment of pension benefits, and keep pension insurance premiums at a minimum. Defined benefit pension plans promise to pay a specified monthly benefit at retirement, commonly based on salary and years on the job.

PBGC is not funded by general tax revenues. PBGC collects insurance premiums from employers that sponsor insured pension plans, earns money from investments and receives funds from pension plans it takes over.

PBGC pays monthly retirement benefits, up to a guaranteed maximum, to nearly 744,000 retirees in 4,000 pension plans that ended. Including those who have not yet retired and participants in multiemployer plans receiving financial assistance, PBGC is responsible for the current and future pensions of about 1,476,000 people.

The maximum pension benefit guaranteed by PBGC is set by law and adjusted yearly. For plans ended in 2009 and 2010, workers who retire at age 65 can receive up to $4,500 a month ($54,000 a year). The guarantee is lower for those who retire early or when there is a benefit for a survivor. The guarantee is increased for those who retire after age 65.

How’s that “secure retirement” thing looking for you now, Mr. and Mrs. America?